Feld Thoughts

JULY 28, 2020

My new book with Ian Hathaway, The Startup Community Way , is officially out. I’ve now written seven of them, all about startups and entrepreneurship. Some of the inspiration for The Startup Community Way came from Eric Ries. This was analogous to what happened with Startup Communities.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 29, 2011

Finance Friday’s gets off the ground with today’s post by introducing you to an imaginary startup, the entrepreneurs that we’ll being following throughout the series, and their first challenges: splitting up the founders’ equity and addressing the case where one of the founders provides the initial seed capital for the business.

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Feld Thoughts

MARCH 2, 2010

Y Combinator Series AA Equity Financing Documents (by WSGR). Series Seed Financing Documents (by Fenwick & West). However, until there is one standardized set of documents that everyone – especially the various law firms agree on – I don’t expect there to really be a standardized set of seed financing documents.

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Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Here’s the punchline: if you run your company as if you have closed a VC equity financing round even though you actually closed a convertible debt round, you’ll be in much better shape when it comes time to raise your Series A financing. There is no discussion of burn, runway, and more financing yet.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 28, 2015

For example, from a post in 2008 about Rally’s $16.85m financing , I riffed on the origins of the company. About a year after he got started, he was ready to raise a venture financing. Ryan was encouraged to team up with Tim and shortly after that happened we co-led the first round VC financing with Boulder Ventures.

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Feld Thoughts

JUNE 24, 2016

The main character wanted to start a company, or join a startup, but couldn’t make either happen in the context of the current H1-B visa constraints. I’ve offered to help, and – like I did with Code: Debugging the Gender Gap – am providing some financing for that effort. Now, this wasn’t a dry movie.

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Feld Thoughts

OCTOBER 7, 2013

This check is for The Community Foundation and for the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCO) and results from a gift of 24,793 shares of common stock from Rally at the time of its first financing that represented approximately 1% of the equity of the company. I remember numerous conversations with Ryan about this.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 9, 2013

Pre-orders for the new book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business by Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, are available now on Amazon. Matt has the entire outline of Startup CEO up on his blog. I think Startup CEO is going to be a must read for any CEO. Do Matt a solid and go pre-order it today.

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Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 26, 2016

Some of that writing has appeared on this blog – and will continue to appear here and on two other blogs – Venture Deals and Startup Revolution , both of which have lain fallow for a while. The post Book: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

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Feld Thoughts

JULY 24, 2013

I’m excited to announce the launch of the Colorado Startup Community Fund. This is a $200,000 fund for providing financing to support activities, events, and organizations in the Colorado startup community. It’s part of the Startup Colorado initiative and is going to make the first round of grants at the end of Q3.

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Feld Thoughts

AUGUST 26, 2013

As many of you know, mentoring women in startups and STEM careers is important to me, so I’m very pleased to be a part of the Startup Phenomenon: Women program, a one-day event in Macky Auditorium at CU-Boulder. The post Startup Phenomenon: Women – Event in Boulder – 9/3 appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

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Feld Thoughts

OCTOBER 21, 2013

An event called Startup Phenomenon is happening In Boulder on 11/13 – 11/15. It gets to the heart of how startup communities are developed and I’d love to have you join me at it. in terms of tech-startup density. in terms of tech-startup density. Collins, Denver, and Colorado Springs.)

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 20, 2013

Ben and his team have designed, developed, manufactured, and financed a long list of successful products and they’ve built Bolt around best-practices for these kinds of companies. If you’re a startup with a piece of hardware (or plan to have one) check out Bolt and apply to be part of their first accelerator class.

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Feld Thoughts

SEPTEMBER 2, 2020

Chapter 11 is the one on Modern Finance. Who said professors at MIT didn’t have a sense of humor. Structured in two parts, the book first showcases how the unique atmosphere at MIT encourages its innovative entrepreneurs to thrive.

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Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 30, 2013

re-introducing the Startup Visa Act of 2013 (good). Yesterday, as part of his Comprehensive Immigration Report plan , President Obama explicitly listed the Startup Visa as one of the initiatives. Obama: “Create a “startup visa” for job-creating entrepreneurs. Canada’s startup visa program. Hallelujah.

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Feld Thoughts

JUNE 22, 2011

financings, IPOs, valuations, and bubbles (or not bubbles). Several years ago, there was a lot more about “how to startup a company&# , especially around product, vision, and team. It was with this backdrop that I read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries over the weekend.

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Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 15, 2019

The post Implicit Gender Bias in Startup Funding appeared first on Feld Thoughts. By flashing the same light on every start-up’s potential for gains and losses, you enable all deserving start-ups to shine and you maximize returns in the process.” ” Her talk is only 15 minutes long and well worth it.

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Feld Thoughts

JUNE 1, 2015

On Saturday, I polished off Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook. I started it last weekend at the tail end of my Weekend Reading on Startup Communities but four books weren’t in me so I didn’t finish it. It was excellent and is now on my “all startup CEOs must read” list.

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Feld Thoughts

MAY 1, 2019

The second one is on Validating Your Startup Idea which based on the book Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job which I wrote with Sean Wise. Evaluating your startup idea from Brad Feld on Validating Your Startup Idea by Brad Feld. Raising venture capital from Brad Feld on Raising Capital by Brad Feld.

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Venture Capital Startup Finance 111

Feld Thoughts

MARCH 24, 2017

Foundry Group is best known for our investments in startups, but our vehicle currently investing in other venture funds, Foundry Group Next, is off to what we believe to be a great start and I wanted to share an update about it by talking about our new investment in a fund managed by Founder Collective.

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Founder LP Technical Review Seed Stage 75

Feld Thoughts

JULY 19, 2018

“Historically, the $10 million valuation mark has been somewhat of a ceiling for seed stage startups. I remember when, in a period of about six months, the ceiling on seed financings vanished. Suddenly every company was raising a seed financing of at least $5m, regardless of the experience of the team.

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Early Stage Seed Stage Valuation Finance 105

Feld Thoughts

APRIL 21, 2016

Bill Gurley wrote an incredible post yesterday titled On the Road to Recap: Why the unicorn financing market just became dangerous … for all involved. If you are a founder, an employee in a startup, or an investor in a startup, you have to be playing a long term game. It’s long but worth reading every word slowly.

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Feld Thoughts

FEBRUARY 25, 2011

were a key part of every startup plan. However, it’s wired into the DNA of the business, not an extra thing that is attached on, like it used to be in the 1980′s and 1990′s as “marketing&# , “PR&# , “marcomm&# , etc.

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Feld Thoughts

JUNE 29, 2017

We led the financing, and I joined the board to work more closely with Greg Gottesman, Geoff Entress, Mike Galgon, and Ben Gilbert to build a long-lasting and enduring startup studio in Seattle. Julie previously was a partner at Madrona Venture Group and is deeply involved in the Seattle startup community.

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Seattle Management Global Finance 129

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 5, 2013

And, as I’ve observed in the world of tech and startups I play in, transparency is used all the time to justify something, but rarely actually supported by behavior. Startup Boards boards jack stack moz return path revenue startup boards transparent' ” I view this as a benchmark for transparency. .”

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Feld Thoughts

MARCH 18, 2014

My partner Jason Mendelson and I even churned out a series on venture capital financing. Forcing myself to sit down and work through these ideas in a logical sequence for an audience of readers required me to refine my thinking on how I invest in startups. How could I make the financing process more efficient?

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Cofounder Angel Investor Venture Capital Finance 182

Feld Thoughts

SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

If you are interested in really understanding how venture deals and startup financings work, please join us for the course. We’ll be actively involved with hangouts during the course as well as on the message boards. The post Venture Deals – Online Class – 3rd Edition appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

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Finance Startup 132

Feld Thoughts

JULY 15, 2013

Richard Florida continues to write amazing stuff about Startup Communities in The Atlantic Online. For a long time I’ve suggested that an interesting measure of entrepreneurial density would be ((entrepreneurs + employees of startups) / total population). High-Tech Challengers to Silicon Valley. This data was slanted to Boulder.

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Venture Capital San Francisco Silicon Valley San Jose 164

Feld Thoughts

JANUARY 8, 2016

The first finance course I took at MIT was 15.401: Finance Theory I and was taught by Stewart Myers. Except – not really – since a big part of my job is corporate finance, just for startups and fast growing companies. But, for some reason, I occasionally like reading about Wall Street and corporate finance.

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Flash Equity Stock Finance 70

Feld Thoughts

APRIL 29, 2015

No understanding of the human dynamics behind the financing. No underlying metrics that drive the financing. Recently, the gang at SalesLoft told the detailed story of their $10m financing. None of them covered the financing in any way. financing of Mattermark. There’s no real story there.

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Atlanta Valuation Term Sheet Finance 70

Feld Thoughts

JULY 25, 2017

While there are lots of non-profits supporting entrepreneurship, CAE is organized around the idea of engaging and educating policymakers in Washington and at state and local levels across the nation, regarding the critical importance of entrepreneurs and startups to innovation. I met the John Dearie founder and CEO of CAE, a year ago.

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Feld Thoughts

SEPTEMBER 21, 2014

The first was at Denver Startup Week, where we did a panel discussion with Ben Huh and Bart Lorang where we discussed the pact between CEO and Board, the pact between Founder and Investor, and how to be transparent and direct. I got to spend a lot of time with my close friend Rand Fishkin the past few days. We invested in Moz in April 2012.

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Feld Thoughts

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

Mark Suster wrote a great post yesterday titled The Resetting of the Startup Industry. I watched, participated, and suffered through every type of creative financing as companies were struggling to raise capital in this time frame. Until you are consistently generating positive cash flow, you depend on someone else for financing.

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Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 11, 2017

If you are interested in impact investing, I encourage you to join the Impact Finance Center (IFC) and presenting funders The Anschutz Foundation, Zoma Foundation, The MacArthur Foundation , Colorado Health Foundation , and Gary Community Investments at CO Impact Days 2017 , Nov 15-17, in Denver, Colorado.

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Colorado Denver Seattle Cofounder 123

Feld Thoughts

AUGUST 12, 2011

When we were last with Dick and Jane on Finance Fridays, our fearless entrepreneurs were figuring out how to split up their founders equity and account for an investment from Jane. Feeling overwhelmed, Dick emailed his friend Josh, the CEO of an early-stage startup in Boulder, to see how they figured out all of this stuff.

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Balance Sheet Forecast Cap Table Early Stage 136

Feld Thoughts

SEPTEMBER 19, 2013

On 4/1/11 Yesware had a vision, a crappy prototype (that we threw away immediately after the financing), and a huge obsession around a vexing problem that no one was addressing effectively. Yesware has now shifted from the startup phase to the scaling up phase. My Investments battery ventures gmail salesforce scaleup startup yesware'

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Feld Thoughts

JUNE 26, 2015

I then go on a riff on Startup Communities and Fundraising, where the phrase “Any rich people around here?” I covered the inevitable question about dragicorns and big financings, went on my culture – competence rant, and then answered whether entrepreneurs are born or made. ” popped out and got some applause.

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